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The New Abwehr Hypothesis of The Operation Trump: A Study In Political Psychology, Political Criminology, and Psychohistory, and as the aid for the General, Criminal and the Counterintelligence Investigations of Donald Trump – by Michael Novakhov, M.D. (Mike Nova): Web Research, Analysis, Hypotheses, and Opinions | Current News | Reviews of media reports | Selected reading lists | Site: http://trumpinvestigations.org/ | Bike With Mike! Psycho-Historically And Hermeneutically.

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At the head of this plot might be the certain elements of the New Russian Left, visible and invisible, and including the various military-political circles, German (Stasi dominated) Intelligence, and the ubiquitous Chinese, practicing all kinds of deceptions against everybody, as their traditional “Art of War” is.

There is a role for ordinary citizens in the prevention of mass shootings like the one in Sutherland Springs, Tex., where 26 crosses have been erected to commemorate those killed at the First Baptist Church.

If people are complacent about a high chance of a war in which there would be 300,000 predicted deaths in the first few days if nonnuclear, and a million in the first day if nuclear, then we have reached a state of madness.

Many are concerned about the state of mind of our president, who has control of the nuclear arsenal. You will hear little from organized psychiatry on this matter, because of the warning to its members that it is unethical to state a professional opinion about the president’s behavior without a personal examination or his consent.

Most of my fellow psychiatrists are not aware that there is an exception to this ethics code: the extended analyses of world leaders under controlled conditions of scholarship.

Jerrold Post founded the Central Intelligence Agency’s personality analysis center, and I witnessed him speak at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, where he said it is unethical for mental health professionals not to contribute during these perilous times.

Earlier this year, Dr. Post, who studied Kim Jung-un and his father, warned in a Washington Post article that Kim’s capacity for brutality and his apparent spontaneity could be compounded by President Trump’s own impulsive acts.

Common sense suggests that a small, impoverished country should not be allowed to cause a nuclear war and that the world powers can together use their heads and find a way to prevent this — that is, assuming that our leaders don’t want war.

JEFFREY B. FREEDMAN, NEW YORK

To the Editor:

Nicholas Kristof says the Congressional Research Service estimates that as many as 300,000 people could die in the first few days of war with North Korea. He quotes a Stanford security expert who thinks that number could easily be a million if it were a nuclear exchange.

Senator Lindsey Graham then relays a conversation he had with President Trump, in which he says Mr. Trump insisted: “If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die here.”

That seems to be a particularly chilling calculus. Apparently this president believes that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents would be acceptable, as long as they are not American deaths.

The Paradise Papers reportedly name Donald Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for not disclosing business ties to the Kremlin. Watch the video to find out how and whether or not the Commerce Dept is responding.

In an earlier far more innocent era, my mother told me you will be judged by the friends you keep. For many Americans, this was axiomatic. However, in this cynical era, you are often judged by who you know or who knows you. In some sense, this is a Kafkaesque arrangement where judgments and the assignment of guilt are made without knowledge or forethought.

Take, for example, the stories emanating from revelations of the Paradise Papers. This massive trove of 13.4 million records was founded 100 years ago and operates in various points around the globe managing the assets of very wealthy people. Reflecting millions of loans, financial transactions and e-mails, the data reveal how wealthy individuals manage their portfolios.

Help keep your family safe and comfortable with advanced safety features and plenty of seating. Safety is always riding on board the Toyota Highlander. See for yoursel…

Recently a German newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, unraveled the connections indicating how the wealthy sometimes avoid taxes and make business deals.

Wilbur Ross, the Secretary of Commerce, was caught in the web of these revelations. Despite divesting himself of most business interests when he joined the Trump cabinet, he kept a shipping company, Navigator Holdings, through a chain of companies in the Cayman Islands. Discussing Ross’ Paradise Papers file Jon Swaine of the Guardian noted that Navigator is a company operated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law an allegation that put Ross in the journalistic crosshairs.

The very mention of a transaction in which Russia is included is now branded “collusion.”

Navigator is paid $20 million a year to ship gas out of Russia for a Russian company named Sibur and Sibur is co-owned by Kirill Shamalov, Putin’s son-in-law. Commenting on this matter, Ross said “there is nothing whatsoever improper about Navigator having a relationship with Sibur.” He continued, “The fact that it happens to be called a Russian company does not mean that there’s any evil in it.” That is true on several levels.

This is a third party transaction in which the investor through a holding company joined a deal worth at least $200 a year. Mr. Ross probably knew very little about the transaction and, my guess is, he was unaware of any Russian involvement.

Moreover, the deal does not violate any laws, nor is there any suspicion that is the case. It would appear as if this is a witch hunt in which any reference to Russia is a form of collusion. Clearly this falls into the category of “false news.” But it has even darker implications.

The very mention of a transaction in which Russia is included is now branded “collusion.” You might even describe this phenomenon as contemporary McCarthyism, albeit McCarthy made allegations about those who joined the Communist Party as opposed to present claims that have a gossamer thin relationship to Russian officials.

My guess is these claims aren’t going anywhere, certainly not into the hands of Mr. Mueller, the Special Counsel. But these violations of privacy and reputation should not be overlooked. It is precisely the frivolous investigations of this kind that discourage good people from government service.

The Paradise Papers are certainly not the Pumpkin Papers and, in time, their salacious stories will be replaced. Unfortunately, it will leave in its wake a number of unsubstantiated claims and reputations that have been unfairly besmirched.

Dr. Herb London is president of the London Center for Policy Research and is co-author with Jed Babbin of “The BDS War Against Israel.”

Carter Page, a foreign-policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, speaks with reporters after a day of questions from the House Intelligence Committee in Washington, November 2, 2017. (AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite)

The Russiagate news has sharply accelerated over the past two weeks: the indictments of two senior Trump campaign officials, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates; the guilty plea from George Papadopoulos about his multiple campaign contacts with Russian officials and intermediaries, including those who told him they possessed “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, including “thousands of emails,” before news of the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee was made public; the rumors that next to be indicted by Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russiagate, will be General Michael Flynn, and perhaps his son, too; the avalanche of news about Russian bots and trolls using Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to exacerbate political divisions in 2016 and to support the election of Donald Trump, including the creation of numerous fake personalities; and, of course, the bob-and-weave testimony of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign policy aide, about his pattern of Russian contacts in 2016, delivered to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).

And there’s a lot more to come, including—according toThe Wall Street Journal—the likely criminal indictment of at least six Russian officials for their role in the 2016 cyberattacks. In response, Trump, Page, and Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo are escalating their attacks on the CIA and its intelligence-community partners.

Page’s testimony, all 200-plus pages of it, is popcorn-worthy entertainment, with him denying, obfuscating, and prevaricating under intense questioning from both Republicans and Democrats on the HPSCI. For instance, there’s an exchange between Page and ranking Democrat Adam Schiff over Page’s exasperating assertion that he’s claiming his Fifth Amendment right to protect himself from self-incrimination while, at the same time, announcing that he’s willing to turn over to the committee certain documents and e-mails, but not others (see pages 26-29 of the transcript). At one point, Schiff asks, “Dr. Page, is it your position that you have a Fifth Amendment right to provide nonincriminating emails or documents to the committee but withhold incriminating documents from the committee and selectively comply with the subpoena?”

What Page is apparently worried about is that, for years, the US intelligence community has been watching him and, no doubt, intercepting his e-mails, phone calls, and other communications, and that recorded transcripts and copies of all of those are in the HPSCI’s (and Mueller’s) files. As early as 2013, Page came to the attention of US authorities because of his contacts with suspected Russian spies, who apparently were seeking to recruit him. In 2016, during the campaign, Page was secretly monitored by US intel over renewed contacts with Russians while he was serving on Trump’s foreign-policy team. In April, The New York Timesreported that the FBI obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court–ordered wiretap against Page in 2016 “based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent.” Among his contacts then were a range of leading Russian officials, including top executives of Gazprom, for whom Page was both an adviser and investor. In September 2016, Harry Reid, then the Senate minority leader, wrote to then-FBI Director James Comey about Page’s alleged contacts with “high-ranking sanctioned [Russian] individuals,” part of what Reid—who’d been briefed on what the intelligence community was learning—called evidence of “significant and disturbing ties” between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, according to Yahoo News.

No wonder, then, that Page, echoing Donald Trump, is on the warpath against the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other elements of the US intelligence community. (Those three agencies concurred, in January 2017, that the Russian government, under the direct supervision of Vladimir Putin, hacked into the DNC system and released its contents to WikiLeaks and other outlets in order to tilt the election in Trump’s favor.) In his rambling, often confusing testimony to the HPSCI, and in letters to the committee that he released, Page bitterly denounced his accusers, including the HPSCI, the FBI, and the media, for “civil rights abuses” and “an ongoing witch hunt,” part of what he called “an intensive domestic political surveillance operation… initiated on behalf of the Clinton/Obama regime.”

Yet Page—who may or may not decide to cooperate with Mueller, and in fact may already be doing so—explicitly stated the reason that he’s willing to provide some documents to the House committee but not others: because, he said, he’s concerned that some of the information he might be forced to turn over will in some way contradict what Mueller and the congressional intelligence committees already know, from having looked at the transcripts and copies of his phone calls, texts, and e-mails. The information that he might provide “cannot be as comprehensive as the information that was already illegally collected against me,” he told the HPSCI, and he said he’s worried that some of it might not “match up.” As he put it, “The National Security Agency, CIA, and FBI have infinitely greater data processing capabilities than I do.”

Page’s, and Trump’s, attacks on the CIA et al. might be intended to provide cover, at least as far as the public is concerned, for Page’s overt and covert contacts with leading Russian officials. In his testimony, Page revealed that he did, in fact, meet with Russia’s deputy prime minister—though, earlier, appearing on Chris Hayes’s MSNBC program, Page said his contacts with Russians were limited to “man in the street”-type interactions. At one point in during Page’s testimony, Schiff read to him the text of an e-mail that Page had sent to two Trump campaign officials on July 8, 2016. It read: “I’ll send you guys a readout soon regarding some incredible insights and outreach I’ve received from a few Russian legislators and senior members of the presidential administration here.” Yet under repeated questioning, Page stuck to his story about man-in-the-street contacts and a very brief, “five second” interaction with Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich.

By attacking the CIA—which Trump once compared to Nazi Germany, during the campaign—Page may be getting some help from the CIA itself, at least from its Trump-appointed director, Mike Pompeo. In a major exposé broken by The Intercept, reporters Duncan Campbell and James Risen—the latter a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter formerly with The New York Times and Los Angeles Times—revealed that Pompeo recently met with former high-level NSA official William Binney to discuss Binney’s widely discredited theory that the DNC wasn’t hacked at all and that the WikiLeaks-published e-mails resulted from an internal leak. According to Binney, the meeting with Pompeo came about because Trump himself told Pompeo to meet with him. (Pompeo began the meeting by saying, “The president told me I should talk to you.”) “This is crazy,” a former CIA official told The Intercept. “You’ve got all these intelligence agencies saying the Russians did the hack. To deny that is like coming out with the theory that the Japanese didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor.” CNN, which also reported the Pompeo-Binney meeting, called Binney the purveyor of a “conspiracy theory.”

Unfortunately, that exact “conspiracy theory” was circulated via The Nation this past summer in a widely criticized story by Patrick Lawrence, who cited a memo published by Binney and some of his associates at an outfit called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. In that piece, Lawrence uncritically transmitted the VIPS memo’s claim that the DNC affair was “an inside job” by a DNC official, and not the work of the Russians. (Many Nation contributors, as well as a dissident group within VIPS itself and a fact-checker and outside security expert hired by The Nation, challenged Lawrence’s claims. An editor’s note by Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, attached to the Lawrence article after it was published, concluded: “As part of the editing process, however, we should have made certain that several of the article’s conclusions were presented as possibilities, not as certainties.”)

So far, Pompeo hasn’t officially challenged the CIA’s conclusions about the 2016 hack attack. “The Director stands by, and has always stood by, the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment,” a CIA spokesman told The Intercept. But Pompeo strayed off the straight and narrow at least once. A few weeks ago, he made this statement: “The intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election.” In fact, however, the community made no such conclusion, opting in its January 2017 report not to conclude anything at all, one way or the other, about whether Russia’s actions affected the election’s outcome. Noting that making a political calculation along those lines was beyond its scope, the Intelligence Community Assessment concluded, “We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election.” So Pompeo’s statement was flat-out wrong—and worrisome.

Meanwhile, a little-noticed but important story in The Wall Street Journal last week reported that the Justice Department is pretty well convinced, to say the least, that the Russians did it. Reports the Journal: “The Justice Department has identified more than six members of the Russian government involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers and swiping sensitive information that became public during the 2016 presidential election, according to people familiar with the investigation. Prosecutors and agents have assembled evidence to charge the Russian officials and could bring a case next year, these people said.”

Stay tuned. It now appears that Manafort, Gates, and Papadopoulos are not the only ones who will face charges in the Russiagate affair.

The Wall Street Journal this morning broke a major story: Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating President Trump’s former national security advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn, for allegedly plotting with Turkish officials to arrange the extrajudicial removal of Fethullah Gulen from the United States in exchange for a boatload of money. We put together an emergency podcast with Shane Harris, one of the reporters on the story, Ryan Evans of War on the Rocks, and Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes, Susan Hennessey, Paul Rosenzweig, and Steve Vladeck to cover all the angles. What does it mean? And where does it go from here? Warning: the audio quality is a little rough in spots, recorded conference calls being what they are.

Also, can we talk about how Putin is wearing a shirt and tie under a shirt? It looks like he came late to a fancy dress party and had to throw something on from the lost property bin.

Trump’s press secretary had said the two hadn’t planned on sitting down for a formal meeting while in Asia because of scheduling conflicts on both sides.

But they bumped into each other and seemed pretty happy about it.

All eyes were on the duo because Russia has cast a huge shadow over Trump’s presidency.

Robert Mueller has a team investigating alleged Russian meddling with the US election last year.

It has already been confirmed the country targeted social media platforms and bombarded them with anti-Hillary propaganda.

Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign leader, and his associate, Rick Gates, were asked to surrender themselves to federal authorities to face charges over allegedly laundering millions of dollars for work they were doing on behalf of a pro-Kremlin political party in Ukraine.

Manafort has been charged with 12 counts including conspiracy against the United States.

Meanwhile, George Papadopoulos, a former Trump adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents.

Trump has since tried to distance himself from the news.

He wrote on Twitter recently: ‘The Fake News is working overtime. As Paul Manaforts lawyer said, there was “no collusion” and events mentioned took place long before he came to the campaign.

‘Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar. Check the DEMS!’

M.N. I guess, now we can understand why we have all these problems with the counterterrorism and the counterintelligence. It is easy to see them, and it is easy to exploit these problems, too, for the adversaries.

Dont expect to hear much about human rights abuses in the Philippines, Vietnam or China. This trip will be more chummy than challengingExpect to hear a lot of talk in the coming days about the existential threat posed by North Koreas nuclear weapons and Chinas unfair trade practices, vis a vis the US. The occasion is Donald Trumps forthcoming 11-day, five-country visit to Asia he leaves Washington on Friday for Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines. If White House officials have their way, these two America First themes will dominate the trip.

What you will hear considerably less about are the appalling human rights records of Trumps hosts and his abandonment of almost any pretence of upholding western values such as open, democratic governance. Its true his recent Oval Office predecessors were all guilty, to varying degrees, of double standards on rights. But Trumps studied insouciance plumbs new depths. He seems to have no standards at all.

His personal vanity and weakness notwithstanding, Trump as president bears a responsibility to take a stand

Sizable victories for the Democrats in a series of races offer cheer after a year of Donald Trump. But the party should not feel too reassuredIt was the boost they needed. The jubilation of Democrats as they celebrated the results of Tuesdays elections owed much to the despair of one year before, when they learned that Donald Trump was on his way to the White House, as well as to the extraordinary events since, which have amplified his unfitness for the presidency and the extent of Russian meddling in his favour. Though his name was not on the ballot this time, he loomed large in voters minds. In Virginia and elsewhere, suburban, college-educated and minority voters surged to the polls to defeat Republicans in an anti-Trump vote.

The Democrats scored hefty victories in gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, despite fears they could lose the latter, and grabbed a swath of seats in Virginias House of Delegates. They swept multiple mayoral races around the country and took control of the Washington state Senate. In Maine, voters approved an expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare.

There is a role for ordinary citizens in the prevention of mass shootings like the one in Sutherland Springs, Tex., where 26 crosses have been erected to commemorate those killed at the First Baptist Church.

Sound familiar? It does to American citizens who must regularly study these bloody rituals and be left by political leaders to passively anticipate the carnage next time.

In the aftermath of the Texas horror, politicians led by President Trump are trying to steer away from the obvious issue of what to do about the gun industry’s wanton sale of military-style rifles and pistols on the domestic market.

Mr. Trump called the rampage a “mental health problem at the highest level” and not “a guns situation.” This is the cynical evasion devised by the National Rifle Association, which warmly endorsed candidate Trump, who now parrots the diversionary talking point that we must first control for mental illness.

In fact, President Trump signed a law in February revoking an Obama-era regulation that made it more difficult for the mentally ill to purchase guns.

Mr. Trump, who spoke favorably as a candidate of vigilante shootouts for self-defense, also suggested that if a civilian had not briefly exchanged shots with the Texas shooter after the massacre, the casualty toll “would have been much worse.” The implication was that the bloodshed in Texas, which also included more than 20 wounded, actually makes the case for more guns — that the disease of gun violence is also its cure.

This is a fantasy, not a rational argument; it doesn’t bear the slightest scrutiny. As our colleague Nicholas Kristof notes, the United States outstrips the world in both gun ownership per capita and gun deaths per capita. States with higher proportions of gun ownership also have rates of death by guns higher than the national average. Incidents in which victims kill attackers in self-defense are vanishingly few compared with gun homicides, and suicide is by far the leading cause of gun deaths.

From expanded background checks to assault weapons bans, proposals put forward by gun-safety proponents, unlike continually increasing private American arsenals, would do something to thwart mass shootings. The Texas killer was not motivated by racial hatred, as was the killer of the Charleston churchgoers, but by family grievance, underlining the lethal combination of domestic abuse and firearms. Abusers’ access to guns increases the risk of intimate partner homicide as much as fivefold, according to a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. While federal law prohibits those convicted of domestic violence, as Mr. Kelley was, from buying or possessing firearms, the Air Force failed to add him to a federal database, allowing him to pass necessary background checks. The right law was on the books but enforcement was lax.

And yet so many politicians continue to promote the wares of the gun industry. Two years ago, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas tweeted “I’m embarrassed: Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind California. Let’s pick up the pace Texans. @NRA.” On Monday he said the problem was out of human hands.

“We have evil that occurs in this world,” Governor Abbott declared, as if from a pulpit, equating all manner of global terrorist attacks, including the murder of eight last week by a truck driver in Manhattan. When asked how the evil of gun violence can be overcome, he replied “you do that by working with God.” Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, even envisioned “arming some of the parishioners or the congregation so that they can respond” if another massacre occurs.

This is the level of pro-gun argument being offered by Republican leaders and some Democrats. It is made in service to the N.R.A. and the gun industry, not the American public.

New developments in the Sutherland Springs Texas church shootingmySanAntonio.com
The gunman Devin Patrick Kelley who killed at least 26 people in a church south of San AntonioSunday died from what authorities believe is a self-inflicted gunshot wound after he crashed his car. He had been chased by armed bystanders. Read more: …

Three of the worst five shootings in modern US history have happened in the last 16 months.

It began – more or less – with 13, the number killed in 1949 in Camden, New Jersey, one of the earliest mass shootings in the US. An army veteran, Howard Unruh, killed his neighbours.

Over the next several decades, the numbers went up: 16 in Austin, Texas, on a campus in 1966, and 21 slain at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California, in 1984.

The past month or so have been especially brutal, as two attacks unfolded – in Las Vegas (58 dead) and Sutherland Springs, Texas (26). They followed a June 2016 assault in an Orlando nightclub in which 49 people were killed.

The reasons for this disturbing trend are many and complex, and people across the US and around the world have struggled to understand the violence.

Here analysts discuss some of the factors that may lie behind the grim numbers:

Weapons are more powerful – and shoot faster

The shooters have increasingly been using guns with high-capacity magazines, allowing them to fire off dozens of rounds without having to reload.

“There are more people being shot in a shorter amount of time – with more bullets in them,” explained Harvard School of Public Health’s David Hemenway.

Adam Lanza, who killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, and James Holmes, who killed 12 in Aurora, Colorado, that year, both used weapons with this feature. The data’s clear: the number of killings in individual attacks goes up when assault rifles are used.

Researchers have also examined the laws: a ban on semiautomatic assault weapons and large-capacity magazines was passed in 1994. It was lifted in 2004.

Experts said lifting the ban helped to usher in a new era of mass shootings. With these weapons, individuals could shoot faster and for longer periods of time – and consequently were able to kill more people in their attacks.

In addition states have their own laws. After the Sandy Hook massacre, a Connecticut law was passed that banned semiautomatic rifles (or assault weapons, as they’re also known).

Other states loosened their gun laws, however. In Georgia, for example, a law was passed that allowed people to carry weapons in school classrooms, nightclubs and other places. Experts at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence wrote that people in states with stricter gun controls tended to see less gun violence.

Assailants choose their sites more carefully

Attacks are now carried out in places with a large number of people – such as a Las Vegas concert venue with 22,000 people. “With that type of crowd, the shooter didn’t even have to aim,” said University of Central Florida’s Jay Corzine.

Most of the people who carry out mass shootings plan the attacks carefully, according to Homicide Studies.

The gunman who opened fire at a Batman screening in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012 “thought a movie theatre would lead to higher fatalities”, said the University of Alabama’s Adam Lankford.

The shooters are inspired by media accounts

Coverage of mass shootings – like the assaults themselves – have exploded in recent years. Shooters post on social media before the attacks and sometimes while the assaults are underway.

Media organisations create live pages and provide 24/7 coverage of an assault. In addition journalists often focus on the killers, providing details about their lives and unintentionally contributing to a glorification of these individuals.

Yet overall, say experts, the stories did not cause an increase in the number of deaths in the assaults. “I’ve seen media accounts of mass shootings for the past 25 years, and the uptick of high casualties has been pretty recent,” said Corzine. Still the coverage gives people ideas.

“Mass shootings are contagious,” said Gary Slutkin, founder of a Chicago-based organisation, Cure Violence. “People see what other people do, and they follow that.”

The shooters compete with each other

Dylan Klebold, one of the attackers at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, described their goal: “the most deaths in US history…we’re hoping.”

As Lankford explained: “This really is a race for notoriety – to be bigger and better than the attackers who came before you.”

Becoming famous as a mass shooter may seem like a sick glory. Yet it holds an allure for some. “It’s, ‘Well, yeah…,'” Slutkin said, describing how these individuals consider the possibility of fame and spend little time contemplating the likelihood of their own grisly fate: “It isn’t all the way thought through.”

AR-15 style rifles are common among mass shootingsWBIR-TV
AR-15 style rifles have become the weapon of choice in recent mass shootings, including the Texas church shooting Sunday, the Orlando nightclub last year and Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. The manufacture of rifles more than doubled in the last …

Mass shootings in America: 4 essential readsWTOP
For injury prevention, it is far more effective and long-lasting to change the environment by changing modifiable policies and norms than to try to change the way children behave.” A mass shooting often brings out partisan politics. Those who want to …

Texas authorities: We won’t mention shooter’s name againWashington Post
The shooter’s name went unspoken at a news conference on the killings at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and authorities there said they intend to keep refraining from saying it. “We do not want to glorify him and what he has done,” Texas …

Texas authorities: We won’t mention shooter’s name againBoston Herald
Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina who studies the social effects of technology, said evidence shows that future mass shooters were carefully watching coverage of the most recent attacks. She has repeatedly urged — both …

Uh, notice a problem there, guys? You can’t compare across countries without adjusting for population. A country with more people, all else equal, will have both more guns and more mass shootings, driving a false correlation between the two.

They get to the adjusted data about halfway through the piece. It’s true that the U.S. and Yemen are the countries with the most guns and the most shooters — and that is something that could, plausibly, suggest that easy access to guns increases mass shootings. But also worth noting is that there’s no pattern visible for the entire rest of the data set. Gun ownership varies from basically nonexistent to above 30 guns per 100 people, yet these variations don’t obviously correspond to variations in mass shootings.

There are a few other issues with the piece worth pointing out, in no particular order:

Their mass-shooting numbers and much of their analysis — including a claim that gun ownership correlates with mass shootings even after the U.S. is excluded and overall homicide rates are taken into account — come from the researcher Adam Lankford, who has refused to share information about his analysis with media outlets likely to criticize him.

In one paragraph, they claim that more gun ownership means more “gun murders,” but two of the four sources they link document gun deaths including suicide.

We shouldn’t care about “gun murders” or “mass shootings”; we should care about murders in general and mass killings in general, regardless of how they’re accomplished. (Up to a point it’s essentially tautological to claim that more guns translates to more problems with guns, because a society with no guns by definition cannot have any problems with them.) As I’ve noted numerous times before, there is no simple, consistent correlation between gun ownership and murder or homicide rates in general, either among developed countries or among U.S. states. More sophisticated studies face a variety of serious methodological obstacles — I don’t find any of them that compelling — and have reached varying conclusions. The research on mass shootings in particular is in an even more primitive state.

They claim that the U.S. has more lethal crime than other developed countries but not more crime in general, and argue that guns are the difference. Even if we take the initial claim at face value, in blaming guns we encounter the problem that, as Steven Pinker once put it, “If you subtract out all the gun homicides in the United States and you just look at the homicides committed with, say ropes, candlesticks, and daggers, we still kill people at a higher rate.” I went through various reasons for our high rate of lethal violence here.

I wouldn’t purport to know for a fact that gun ownership doesn’t lead to higher homicide or mass-shooting rates, but the effects are far more complicated and subtle than gun controllers want us to believe.

If you admit as the hypothetical explanatory option the hostile special intelligence operation nature of the mass killings, and it is impossible not to consider this scenario as an, if not the (in majority of cases) explanation, then all the sociological and the statistical studies become irrelevant, just as the gun ownership explanatory theory, which is indeed false, in my opinion. This latter factor might be contributing but not the root cause, and not the main causal factor in the modern-day U.S. culture.

Michael Novakhov

11.7.17

P.S.: But the good thing is that we started to ask these questions and started to look for the answers. We should not let the conceptual stereotypes to cloud our judgment. One of such stereotypes, regarding “Al Qaeda”, started to crumble before our eyes: “21 Years of War with Al Qaeda?” “ISIS”, probably is next.

It looks like the beginning of the end of the historical denial. So much for the powers of the very plausible self-deception: “I do not see it, because I do not want to see it”, just like the good old three monkeys.

Worldwide, Mr. Lankford found, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country. And it held when he controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence.

Last week, in the deadliest terrorist attack in New York City since 9/11, Sayfullo Saipov turned a nearly mile-long stretch of bike path along Manhattan’s West Side Highway into a killing ground. The attack reflects a terrorism threat that is morphing from the complex, externally directed attack carried out by a network that we saw on 9/11 to violent individuals, inspired online by ISIS and other radical jihadist groups. We built an architecture to prevent another 9/11, but we have a long way to go when it comes to tackling this latest phase of terrorism.

The good news is that communities have proven resilient when attacked. The bad news is that this week—with calls for “extreme vetting” and denigration of our criminal justice system as a tool against terror—we saw dangerous backsliding instead of a renewed focus on the work needed for the next phase in the war on terror.

How should we respond to this latest terror act on our soil? Rather than demagoguing on immigration, launching divisive political attacks, or disparaging our criminal justice system, we should focus on what works. Effectiveness should be our lodestar. Russia is not the only one who wants to weaken the United States by sowing division in our country—the terrorists want to do so as well. We shouldn’t let them.

When tragedy and terror strike we must deliver swift and certain justice consistent with the rule of law. While it appears cooler heads have prevailed to reverse the President’s initial impulse to send the New York attacker to Guantanamo (an unprecedented and legally dubious move), the fact that we found ourselves having the debate yet again about “war” vs. “law enforcement” in the terror fight prompted disturbing déjà vu. Dedicated professionals across two administrations worked hard to ensure that this country can apply all tools—military, intelligence, law enforcement, diplomacy, financial sanctions—to disrupt threats and hold terrorists accountable. For terrorists caught on U.S. soil, we have relied on a criminal justice system that is the envy of the world not only because it is the hallmark of our rule of law society but also because it gets results.

The record is clear when it comes to generating intelligence, securing convictions and safely holding terrorists. The more than one million federal, state, and local law enforcement officers who work in that system put their lives on the line to keep us safe are anything but a “laughing stock.” To the contrary, they include more than 30,000 FBI agents, intelligence analysts and other professionals who I was proud to call colleagues when I served as Chief of Staff to then FBI-Director Robert S. Mueller. This nation is also served everyday by dedicated federal prosecutors who are no “joke.” That includes those in the Southern District of New York who, true to their tradition of independence, tuned out the political talk and moved swiftly to charge the New York attacker. It was precisely the need for intelligence-driven criminal prosecutions of terrorists and spies that led to the creation of the Justice Department’s National Security Division which I was privileged to lead during the Obama Administration. These elements of our post 9/11 architecture—solidified over both Republican and Democratic Administrations—have brought justice in hundreds of terrorist-related cases since 9/11.

Contrast that approach with the (hopefully short-lived) impulse to send Saipov to Guantanamo on the theory that we’re at war (we are) and he’s an enemy (he is) and enemies don’t get lawyers (not quite). The Supreme Court has determined that Guantanamo Bay, where a detainee has the right to challenge his detention, is not lawyer-free zone. And while a bipartisan effort reformed military commissions in 2009 to maintain a prosecution tool for terrorists caught on a hot battlefield, they have proven anything but swift and certain. In 15 years, the military commissions have delivered just eight convictions or guilty pleas and several of those have been overturned or invalidated. The 9/11 and U.S.S. Cole bombing victims and their families are still waiting for justice today.

Justice would not be served by sending Saipov to Guantanamo. Nor would it serve the goal of generating intelligence and understanding how Saipov came to plow down pedestrians on Halloween afternoon. Saipov reportedly has talked to FBI agents and told them that he consumed ISIS propaganda prior to his attack. Understanding more about how and when he became radicalized is critical to stopping future attacks. But the surest way to keep that from happening would be to interrupt the FBI interrogation and ship Saipov to Guantanamo.

It is dangerous pre-9/11 thinking to suggest that the FBI can’t act in this case—as it has in so many others since 9/11—to obtain intelligence from a terrorist in custody. In fact, the FBI can immediately question terrorists—without giving Miranda warnings—to identify other threats and plots. In 2011 when Congress was considering a mandatory military custody law for terrorist captures here or abroad, the FBI was right to argue that such a mandate would interrupt their intelligence gathering process by turning a terrorist over to the military where he could challenge his military detention with the benefit of a lawyer. Sure enough, in case after case where the FBI has moved quickly to gather intelligence and then bring a prosecution in our courts, terrorists have pled guilty or received lengthy sentences in the highest security Federal prisons. And importantly the FBI has been able to generate intelligence that led to the capture of other terrorists (Just ask Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab). We need this intelligence now more than ever in order to understand how Saipov was radicalized and how someone might have intervened in time to stop him.

It appears that Saipov did not slip through the vetting system, but instead may fall into the more-common category that DHS described in March of this year when it concluded that most foreign born, US-based terrorists are radicalized after they arrive. At the moment, we have a rare opportunity, having taken Saipov into custody alive. As NYPD Deputy Commissioner John Miller said, Saipov followed the ISIS playbook “to a tee” by weaponizing a vehicle and leaving a note to brag about it. This breed of terrorist poses a significant challenge to law enforcement and we should strive to learn as much as we can about Saipov’s path to radicalization.

In response to this challenge, we should reject impulsive responses in favor of what works. Recycling campaign chants of “extreme vetting” and pulling the plug on the Diversity Visa Program which reportedly allowed Saipov entry in 2010 is a distraction; he reportedly was radicalized years after he entered the United States. To be clear, we should support strong and thorough vetting for anyone who wants to enjoy the rights and benefits of this country. Such vetting, regardless of specific program, should be refined based on threat intelligence. This is why following the Paris attacks in 2015, the DHS strengthened the visa waiver program to respond to the threat from foreign fighter returnees who may have traveled to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq but held European passports eligible for visa-free travel to the United States. The future of the Diversity Visa Program might be a reasonable topic for debate, but based on what we know now is in no way related to the tragedy on the Westside Highway.

Rather than creating distractions and issuing blanket travel bans, our vetting process should respond to the actual threats we face. We should be building trust in communities we need to identify future threats, not alienating and marginalizing them. Let’s focus on working with social media companies to stop abuse of their platforms. Let’s work to strengthen relationships with our international security partners.

Sixteen years after 9/11 we face a different type of threat. In response, we should emulate the best we’ve seen from this country. We should model resilience and support, and we should reject politics in favor of pragmatism. We must summon the best in our communities, in our government and politics, and rely on that which makes us different from every other country in the world: the rule of law and our justice system. Anything less allows terrorists to divide us.

Has the United States been at war with al-Qaeda for 21 years? During the most recent 9/11 military commission hearing at Guantanamo Bay, the prosecution finally articulated its view of when the U.S. and al-Qaeda entered into an armed conflict. According to the prosecution, that putative armed conflict began more than 21 years ago, on August 23, 1996, the day Osama bin Laden, the founder of the terrorist group, published a fatwa calling for attacks on Americans. The government characterized this fatwa as a declaration of war:

We do believe that the ’96 document written by [Osama] bin Laden, who was the head of al-Qaeda at the time he wrote it, is a declaration of war.

The prosecution apparently staked out this astonishing position, at odds with history, law, and the U.S. government’s interests outside of the 9/11 military commission, to satisfy its short-term litigation goal of preserving the military commission’s personal jurisdiction over the 9/11 defendants.

The Military Commission Act grants military commissions personal jurisdiction over “alien unprivileged belligerents.” The Act defines those as individuals who are not U.S. citizens, who are not privileged belligerents, and who either (1) engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; (2) purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or (3) were a part of al-Qaeda at the time of the alleged offense. All three categories of individual over whom a military commission may have personal jurisdiction must have some connection to hostilities—which the MCA defines as “any conflict subject to the laws of war.” (The timing element of the third category implicates hostilities through §950p(c), which limits offenses triable by military commission to those “committed in the context of or associated with hostilities.”) Hostilities, in turn, are defined as any conflict subject to the laws of war. Thus, the military commission has personal jurisdiction over the 9/11 defendants only if they were connected to an armed conflict between the U.S. and al-Qaeda prior to September 11, 2001.

Since May 2017, the 9/11 military commission is working its way towards a pre-trial, evidentiary hearing on personal jurisdiction. It was in the context of a preliminary hearing addressing what if any witnesses should provide testimony as to personal jurisdiction that Judge Pohl pressed the prosecution for a specific date on which the armed conflict with al-Qaeda began. The government’s response—August 23, 1996—was intended to ensure that the 9/11 military commission could proceed. Unfortunately, that position carries with it significant ramifications implicating state sovereignty—the oldest rule in international law—and fundamental applications and consequences of the law of armed conflict.

It is axiomatic that only states may bring about the legal state of war or, in modern terms, armed conflict, through an act of speech. Historically, the law of war applied to situations of declared war between states. When the 1949 Geneva Conventions established the modern framework for armed conflict that rests primarily on objective indicators of conflict rather than political declarations or determinations, the drafters retained the notion of declared war between states—butonly for conflicts between states. Thus, international armed conflicts—armed conflicts between two or more states—may arise upon a declaration of war alone or through the use of armed force between two states. In contrast, non-international armed conflicts——armed conflicts between states and non-state actors (or among non-state actors)—only exist when non-state actors are sufficiently organized and violence between the parties is sufficiently intense. Whereas Common Article 2, which invokes the full panoply of the Geneva Conventions, applies only to interstate war and may be triggered merely by a declaration of war, Common Article 3 applies alone in the event of “an armed conflict not of an international character.” The drafters of the Geneva Conventions simply made no provision for a non-international armed conflict to be triggered by means of a declaration of war.

In fact, the drafters of the Geneva Conventions intentionally excluded a declared-war trigger for non-international armed conflict. Common Article 3 reflects a careful balance: recognizing that conflicts between states and non-state actors may rise to a level of violence comparable to that of interstate armed conflict, while also accommodating states’ desire to minimize international legal regulation intruding on their internal affairs. This bargain reflects states’ aversion to conferring the sort of legitimacy or legal status on non-state actors that could challenge states’ sovereignty, including by implicitly recognizing their belligerent or insurgent status.

Thus, the final clause of Common Article 3 includes a disclaimer: “The application of the preceding provisions [Common Article 3] shall not affect the legal status of the Parties to the conflict.” Jean Pictet’s authoritative Commentary on the Geneva Conventions specifically attributes the provision’s origin to a desire to “prevent the [non-state] party from basing a claim for recognition as a regular Government on the respect it had shown for the Convention,” as required in the original Convention draft. His explanation of Common Article 3 attributes much of its evolution from its initial proposal to its final form to states’ concerns about legitimizing criminal entities.

“There was also a risk of common or ordinary criminals being encouraged to give themselves a semblance of organization as a pretext for claiming the benefit of the Conventions, representing their crimes as ‘acts of war’ in order to escape punishment for them. A party of rebels, however small, would be entitled under the Conventions to ask for the assistance and intervention of a Protecting Power. Moreover, it was asked, would not the de jure Government be compelled to release the captured rebels as soon as the troubles were over, since the application of the Convention would place them on the same footing as prisoners of war?”

Pictet concluded that without the disclaimer, Common Article 3 would not have been adopted. “It meets the fear—always the same one—that the application of the Convention, even to a very limited extent . . . may confer belligerent status, and consequently increased authority, upon the adverse party.”

The same concerns over extending legitimacy to non-state actors persists today. Indeed, the United States has never ratified Additional Protocol I precisely because it had the potential to “give recognition and protection to terrorist groups” by extending the law pertaining to international armed conflicts to certain non-international armed conflicts. In transmitting his decision not to seek ratification of Additional Protocol I, President Ronald Reagan explained to the U.S. Senate that the application of the full panoply of international humanitarian law to armed non-state actors who do not otherwise comply with the law of armed conflict could legitimate the aims and the practices of terrorist organizations.

Nevertheless, solely in order to extend the military commissions’ jurisdiction over the 9/11 defendants, the government has chosen to legitimize bin Laden and al-Qaeda by placing them on the same legal plane as states, stating last week that:

. . . [O]ur position has always been under international law, when you have international armed conflicts, a declaration of war is sufficient alone [to trigger the law of armed conflict].

. . . .

If we were to declare war on another country today, the law of war would apply from the second we declared war. And that’s really what we are talking about. We are talking about when did the hostilities begin so we know when the law of war took over. And clearly our position has always been that we believe it began in 1996 with [Osama] bin Laden’s declaration . . . .

The military commission prosecution evidently believes that, as a matter of law, an individual or a non-state actor may, through its speech alone, unilaterally bring about a legal state of armed conflict. If the military commission were to credit the prosecution’s position, it would preserve the military commission’s jurisdiction and save the prosecution the trouble and difficulty of demonstrating the existence of a non-international armed conflict prior to 9/11. Unfortunately, the consequences of that inexplicable position are not limited to whether the 9/11 military commission may go forward.

According bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa the legal effect of a declaration of war implies that in 1996 al-Qaeda had the characteristics of a state actor. International law normally limits statehood only to those entities that are able to exert effective control over a definite territory and population, engage in international relations, and garner recognition. But none of this was true of al-Qaeda in 1996. Three months before issuing his fatwa, bin Laden and al-Qaeda were evicted from Sudan and dispossessed of their enterprises there. At the time, al-Qaeda boasted as few as several dozen members. And, seven months later, the Taliban—who by then exerted actual effective control over the territory where bin Laden resided—forced bin Laden to relocate to Kandahar from Nangarhar, where he originally established himself in Afghanistan after fleeing Sudan.

The prosecution’s position imbuing al-Qaeda with state-like powers undermine U.S. interests outside of this military commission in at least five ways. First, it undermines the lawfulness and legitimacy of the U.S. war of self-defense against Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11. If al-Qaeda were a state or something akin to a state in 1996, then by implication Afghanistan and the Taliban did not so much host al-Qaeda as surround it, as if it were an enclaved state. Under the prosecution’s view, therefore, the Taliban could not be responsible for surrendering bin Laden following the 9/11 attacks, and the United States’ ultimatum to hand him over would have been unreasonable: how could a de facto government with only partial control of its own territory be responsible for curtailing the actions of an enclaved sovereign? Consequently, if the prosecution were right that al-Qaeda was the equivalent of a state actor, the invasion of Afghanistan could be viewed as a misdirected and illegal aggressive war.

Second, the prosecution’s position necessarily suggests that the armed conflict between al-Qaeda and the United States is an international armed conflict—as opposed to a non-international armed conflict—invoking the full panoply of the laws of war. This position also means that al-Qaeda members were the regular armed forces of a state, meaning that members of al-Qaeda could make a colorable claim to combatant immunity and prisoner-of-war (POW) status. At the very least, all of those currently detained and accused of prior membership in al-Qaeda should have been treated as POWs until they received an Article 5 hearing. (Ammar al Baluchi, for example, has requested, but never received, an Article 5 hearing.) The prosecution’s position in the 9/11 case legitimizes attacks by members of al-Qaeda on U.S. soldiers and military infrastructure, narrowing the scope of criminality associated with al-Qaeda attacks. For example, according to the prosecution’s view, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole would remain perfidious but the sailors killed and the vessel targeted would be lawful military targets—and the charge of terrorism would be a mere restatement of the object of war: violence intended to coerce a political result.

Third, if the prosecution position prevailed, al-Qaeda would have enjoyed belligerent rights and the benefit of the laws of neutrality. Neutrality of non-belligerents is automatically triggered by the existence of a state of war between belligerents. Neutrals must remain neutral—that is they must not assist one belligerent party against the other. But belligerents must also refrain from conducting hostilities on the territory of neutral states, a fundamental protection for neutrals and against the spread of war. For example, the application of neutrality as a result of the prosecution’s position would mean that the U.S. violated Sudan’s neutrality along with its sovereignty by bombing the al-Shifa pharmaceutical facility in Khartoum in 1998.

Moreover, and outside of the immediate concerns relating to al-Qaeda, the government’s position suggests that declarations of war by non-state actors are a fast-track to sovereignty. The consequences of this implication may be far reaching. There are numerous entities that have substantially stronger claims to statehood than did al-Qaeda in 1996, but that remain outsiders in the international system. Would entities like Somaliland, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Abkhazia, and others finally gain admittance to the international system by declaring war on a neighbor or a far-off foe unlikely to take notice?

Finally, the government’s position leaves unsettled how to differentiate non-state declarations of war that have legal effect from those that do not. The U.S. has been the target of numerous supposed declarations of war by violent non-state actors to which it accorded no legal effect. For example, the United States treated neither the Symbionese National Liberation Army nor the Weathermen as enemy belligerents. Similarly, why give bin Laden’s August 1996 fatwa the legal weight of a declaration of war but not al Qaeda’s earlier 1992 fatwa that likewise called for attacks on U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia?

The only conclusion that can be drawn from the prosecution’s astounding position that bin Laden’s fatwa actually caused a legal state of war with the U.S. is that the government is willing to contort the law of armed conflict to suit its short-term litigation goals. Unfortunately, its single-minded and short-sighted effort to patch up the broken 9/11 military commission is simply making wreckage of law and history—and proving the old adage that hard cases make bad law.

The opinions and views expressed are those of the author alone. They do not represent the views of the US Department of Defense or the US Government.

Worldwide, Mr. Lankford found, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country. And it held when he controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence.

What Doesn’t: Crime, Race or Mental Health

If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.

A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues. And Mr. Lankford, in an email, said countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings.

Whether a population plays more or fewer video games also appears to have no impact. Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country.

Racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little association between immigration or other diversity metrics and the rates of gun murders or mass shootings.

A Violent Country

America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership.

Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime, a notion ingrained, in part, by a series of films portraying urban gang violence in the early 1990s. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.

Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.

They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.

Mass Shootings Happen Everywhere

Skeptics of gun control sometimes point to a 2016 study. From 2000 and 2014, it found, the United States death rate by mass shooting was 1.5 per one million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting American mass shootings were not actually so common.

But the same study found that the United States had 133 mass shootings. Finland had only two, which killed 18 people, and Switzerland had one, which killed 14. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the United States.

As with any crime, the underlying risk is impossible to fully erase. Any individual can snap or become entranced by a violent ideology. What is different is the likelihood that this will lead to mass murder.

In China, about a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren killed 25 people between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a gun.

By contrast, in this same window, the United States experienced five of its deadliest mass shootings, which killed 78 people. Scaled by population, the American attacks were 12 times as deadly.

Beyond the Statistics

In 2013, American gun-related deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 deaths caused by an accidental discharge. That same year in Japan, a country with one-third America’s population, guns were involved in only 13 deaths.

This means an American is about 300 times more likely to die by gun homicide or accident than a Japanese person. America’s gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan’s. That gap between 150 and 300 shows that gun ownership statistics alone do not explain what makes America different.

The United States also has some of the world’s weakest controls over who may buy a gun and what sorts of guns may be owned.

Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people — unusually high, in keeping with the relationship between gun ownership and murders, but still a fraction of the rate in the United States.

Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.

The Difference Is Culture

The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns.

The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than they are anywhere else.

After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 incident. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.

That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.

“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

The Sad, Lonely Men Behind America’s Mass Shootings … 59 people in Las Vegas in what was the worst mass shooting in modern American history, … Is toxic masculinity really the root cause of our mass shooting epidemic?

In little more than a month, we have had two cases of mass murder … The money could be raised by a modest tax on all guns owned in the United States. … Once more we are told that the root cause is a mentally ill person.

Not only are most adult mass shooters in the US men, but most school shooters are boys too. … But it’s also not the root of the cause. … So what makes some people commit mass shootings – what is the common factor that …

Many recent mass killings have been committed by men with histories of … Acts of domestic violence are at the root of a majority of mass shootings: Everytown … The shooter in the attack had a history of domestic violence. …. really addressing what the root causes are, whether that be studies, whether that …

But in the U.S., gun control policy has often appeared impossible to pass at the … This idea describes the debate after mass shootings pretty well; … health problems or declining public morals, as the root cause of the problem.

Most countries have an unpredictable future; Russia has an unpredictable past. That old chestnut has cropped up often this year as the Kremlin has struggled to find an appropriate official way to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Manipulating history for political ends is not unusual — see the Trump administration and the Civil War. But in Russia, invoking history has long been a way of proclaiming political or ideological affiliation. The “Great October Socialist Revolution” was the founding myth of the Soviet Union; Nov. 7 (Oct. 25 on the old Russian calendar), the date of the uprising that brought the Bolsheviks to power, was the national holiday, on which tanks, missiles and high-stepping soldiers swept through Red Square.

The history of the revolution — and of the czarist past, and for that matter of the entire world — was written to fit the myth of Soviet Russia as the vanguard of civilization, and woe to those who tampered with the official version. Unless they were the guardians of the official version, to whom it fell now and again to rewrite and update that history — like when Stalin went abruptly from demigod to footnote.

The end of the Soviet Union in 1990 set history adrift. The collapse of a totalitarian dictatorship that had overthrown an absolute monarchy forced Russians to confront a painful task of choosing what to glorify, what to condemn, and what to gloss over. Impassioned debates over what role of “liberalism,” “democracy” or “elections” might have had a century ago are really about today.

Those who pine for a powerful state, President Vladimir Putin among them, have come to blame Lenin for the territorial costs he incurred for quitting the war with Germany and to credit Stalin with putting it together again (until it was dismantled anew by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin). The last czar, Nicholas II, is alternately seen as a weak master who either foolishly allowed the autocracy to founder or who failed to ride with a democratizing tide. The Russian Orthodox Church has canonized him as martyr of an idealized, God-fearing past.

The fall of Communism is the onset of freedom for some, the collapse of empire for others, and simply irrelevant to many Russians under 35, who, according to public opinion polls, simply don’t know much about 1917.

Early Monday, the very first charges were issued in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. Three former Trump campaign officials were indicted in the probe: Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, and two lesser-known Trump associates Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos. So what are the details […]

President Trump on Thursday appeared to rule out sending the New York terrorism suspect to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after threatening a day earlier to send the alleged attacker to the detention center. Backing off his initial statement that he was considering detaining the suspect at America’s most notorious prison, Trump said Thursday […]

On Tuesday afternoon, a 29-year-old Uzbek immigrant, Sayfullo Saipov, allegedly drove a rental truck down a bicycle path in Lower Manhattan. Saipov said he was inspired to carry out the attack by the Islamic State. Eight people — pedestrians and cyclists who were on the path — were killed and at least a dozen were injured […]

TOKYO — President Trump offered a brief overview of his five-country, 12-day trip to Asia as he flew from Honolulu to Tokyo on Saturday, telling reporters that he expects to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin while abroad, plans to pressure other leaders to take a tougher stance on North Korea, and thinks he is […]

SEOUL — President Trump arrived in South Korea on Tuesday and toured Camp Humphreys, the third military base he has visited since leaving Washington on a 12-day trip to the Asia Pacific as he prepares to deliver a major speech on North Korea. The president landed at the $11 billion base, 40 miles south of […]

On the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution weare publishing theproclamation issued on November 7 (October 25, O.S.), 1917 by the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet.The proclamation was titled “K Grazhdanam Rossii (To the Citizens of Russia!)” and was distributed widely throughout Petrograd.

From the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies

To the citizens of Russia.

The Provisional Government has been overthrown. State power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the Revolutionary Military Committee, which stands at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.

The cause for which the people have struggled—the immediate offer of a democratic peace, the abolition of landlord ownership of land, workers’ control over industry, the creation of a soviet government—this cause has been assured!

Long live the revolution of workers, soldiers and peasants!

The Military Revolutionary Committee
of the Petrograd Soviet
of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies
October 25, 1917, at 10:00 a.m.

Those who claim to have been shocked the Russians might have meddled in the 2016 election are either playing for the cameras or not paying attention. They, and the Soviets before them have employed “active measures”— a technical term that applies to all kinds of espionage — in the United States and the West practically from the moment the Czar was overthrown.

For those who came in late, this kind of stuff is not new. And the U.S. does it, too. We’ve spent money on everything from propaganda to keep the Communists from coming to power in Italy after World War II to trying to oust Benjamin Netanyahu from the top job in the Israeli government.

Earlier this week, a congressional committee took a deep dive into the alleged Russian interference. The matter of foreign manipulation of the U.S. electorate is one on which Congress should tread carefully. It’s a lot more complex than the Washington politicians and the media stars who travel the Acela between New York and the nation’s capital want you to believe.

The idea was first pushed by people looking for a reason Hillary Clinton lost an election she seemed destined by fate to win. It’s true the Russians put ads on the web. It’s true the Trump campaign met with some Russians and may, as charged, have sought a few of them out to see if they had dirt on Clinton not available through normal channels.

Yet, it’s also true the Democrats were up to much the same thing. The so-called dossier on Trump prepared by Christopher Steele, variously described as a former British intelligence operative, was produced through a private opposition research effort secretly financed by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.

That aside, some members of Congress think social media companies are to blame. As the conduits through which information about both Clinton and Trump spread through the electorate, they are supposed to shoulder much of the responsibility for what occurred.

But look at the numbers. Facebook, one of several social media companies called this past week to testify at one point volunteered that ads with content attributable to the Russians in some way went into the newsfeeds of 29 million Americans over a two-year period.

When they finally got all the way downstream they’d been seen, the company estimates, by close to 126 million people, maybe more. That’s at least a third of the country but, over the same period, Americans had more than 30 trillion items flow through their news feed.

Even if you believe every single allegedly Russian spot was read and sent along to at least one other person it constitutes less than one half of one percent of everything people saw. More importantly, no one has shown through any kind of study these ads affected the way people voted.

That’s the key. It’s not a question of whether the Russians were trying to manipulate things; they almost certainly were. The question is whether it worked. In all likelihood it didn’t, though truth is probably unknowable.

Some in Congress don’t care. Needing to look like they’re on the alert and with little consideration of the implication of what they’ve proposed, legislation to regulate Net-based ads and other political communications has already been introduced. These are regulations social media platforms will have to enforce. As blame-shifting goes, that’s like Congress telling computer manufacturers it’s their job to put a stop to hacking and identity theft.

If Congress wants to go any further down this road it should keep the focus where it belongs. Suggesting Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies are somehow complicit in espionage because their platforms were used and abused by techies working for the Russians to spread disinformation misses the point. Facebook is already working on its own to prevent a replay of what happened in 2016. So, one suspects, are the other social media companies.

The government, particularly the U.S. intelligence community should be its willing, helpful partner. Cooperation between the public and private sector will maximize both the efforts and the opportunities to keep disinformation from Russia or anywhere else from spreading while protecting our right to free speech. It’s a win-win. With the government mandates included in the legislative proposals already introduced in Congress, everyone loses.

Roff is a former senior political writer for UPI and a well-known commentator based in Washington, D.C. Email him at peter.Roff@Verizon.net.

The principle of common good underpins the constitution. Donald Trump is gleefully shredding that idealThe Trump administration, having passed the six-month milestone in office, kicked off the next phase of his presidency with an explosion of crazy, spread over the past seven days. Like sweeps week on The Apprentice, every day saw some headline-grabbing event to garner ratings. It started with leaks against his former bosom buddy, attorney general, Jeff Sessions. President Trump, sources said, was planning to fire him. It moved on to a speech to the Boy Scouts of America jamboree, where Trump told the story of a property developer who lost a fortune and was lurking at a New York party with the hottest people. Later, there was a tweet announcement banning transgender people from the military.

This explosion of crazy concluded with his new White House chief of communications, Anthony Scaramucci, calling the New Yorkers political correspondent Ryan Lizza to trash virtually everyone in the White House. He compared himself positively to the presidents dark lord and special adviser, Stephen Bannon: Im not Steve Bannon, Im not trying to suck my own cock. Im not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the president.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has long been looking into Donald Trump Jr’s meeting with Russian government representatives during the election, as Donald Trump appears to have committed obstruction of justice by trying to cover up the true nature of his son’s meeting. However, based on new details from one of the people who attended the meeting, Junior could be facing criminal charges relating to bribery.Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-connected attorney who met with Donald Trump Jr, is now offering damning new details about the meeting. Last week she confirmed that she ran her talking points past Russian President Vladimir Putin in advance, thus confirming that she was indeed acting on behalf of the Russian government. Now she claims that Trump Jr hinted that he and his father might change U.S. law in order to accommodate her.Here’s what Veselnitskaya now claims Donald Trump Jr said to her regarding the Magnitsky Act, which Russia has long sought to get repealed: “Looking ahead, if we come to power, we can return to this issue and think what to do about it.” (source: Bloomberg). This was during the same conversation in which Trump Jr asked her for secret information on Hillary Clinton which could have helped his father’s campaign. When you put these two things together, the argument can be made that one was being offered in exchange for the other, which one legal expert says could meet the legal definition of bribery.

Former federal Prosector Renato Mariotti explains that “offering to exchange an official act for something of value is like soliciting a bribe.” (link). He goes on to cite a past case law against a politician which helps to frame how this could result in bribery charges against Donald Trump Jr. This is in addition to the obstruction of justice charges that Donald Trump could face for making misleading statements about his son’s meeting.

Last night an international consortium of journalists published the Paradise Papers, which included evidence that a number of members of the Donald Trump administration have secret financial ties to Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. Now multiple sources are suddenly pointing to anywhere from one to six resignations forthcoming and some of the names are very high profile in nature.The Paradise Papers exposed evidence that Donald Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, his Ambassador to Russia Jon Hunstman, and others in the administration have secret financial ties to Russia, which they’ve tried to disguise along the way. Now today there are reports that both of them could resign, along with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke.Here’s how political insider and MSNBC guest commentator Scott Dworkin has framed the matter today: “Ive received reports today saying DeVos, Huntsman, Ross, Sessions, Tillerson & Zinke are resigning for ties to Russia &/or for corruption.” (link). But he’s not the only source talking resignations today. The news outlet Salon is reporting today that Betsy DeVos is expected to resign due to what her allies categorize as frustration with the Secretary of Education bureaucracy (link), in what could simply be an excuse to bail on the job before things get scandalous.

Jeff Sessions has been caught telling several lies about the campaign’s involvement with Russia. Ryan Zinke is caught up in the chartered flight scandal which has already led to the resignation of HHS Secretary Tom Price. Rex Tillerson has long been rumored to be on his way out, both due to his frustration on the job, and his “moron” debacle with Donald Trump. If any one of these six resignations takes place, in the context of how weak and scandalized Trump already is, it could be a bodyblow to him. If several resignations do indeed take place, it could be the ballgame.

This summer, Gary Younge took a trip from Maine to Mississippi to find out what has brought the US to this point. From the forgotten poor to desperate addicts, their whiteness is all some of them have left and that makes fertile ground for the far rightJeff Baxters enduring memory, from childhood, is the glow. Coming down over the hill overlooking the coke plant in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the molten iron would make itself known both as a vision and an aspiration. Its like the sun landed there, says Baxter, a burly, bearded retiree, who achieved his boyhood dream of becoming a steelworker.Today, the plant, like the one Baxter worked in for 30 years, stands derelict a shell that represents a hollowing out not just of the local economy but of culture and hope as though someone extinguished Baxters sun and left the place in darkness. Buildings in the centre of town that were once testament to the industrial wealth produced here stand abandoned. More than 40% of the population now live below the poverty line; 9.1% are unemployed.

There is systemic racism, but black people have advocates. Poor white people dont

A huge new leak of financial documents has revealed how the powerful and ultra-wealthy, including the Queen’s private estate, secretly invest vast amounts of cash in offshore tax havens.
Donald Trump’s commerce secretary is shown to have a stake in a firm dealing with Russians sanctioned by the US.
The leak, dubbed the Paradise Papers, contains 13.4m documents, mostly from one leading firm in offshore finance.
BBC Panorama is part of nearly 100 media groups investigating the papers.

With high-ranking politicians appearing in the Paradise Papers, officials around the globe were quick to react to the leak. The EU and India have started investigations while Russian and US officials were on the defense.

With Manafort, It Really Is About Russia, Not UkraineNew York Times
Administration officials dismiss the alleged criminal activity by Mr. Manafort, formerly President Trump’s campaign chairman, as being merely about money-laundering and Ukraine but not Russia, the focus of the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III …and more »

BERLIN (Reuters) – Immigration and climate policy are the most contentious issues in exploratory negotiations between three parties seeking to form Germany’s next government, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday, adding that she wants proper talks to start in 10 days.

The American presidents poor grasp of international relations, his bluster and his America first rhetoric are unlikely to reap success in the face of Xi Jinping pragmatism

The phrase bull in a china shop might have been coined to describe this weeks tour of Asia by Donald Trump. During last years presidential election campaign, he raged against China, terming it an enemy and accusing Beijing of raping America with predatory trade practices. With characteristic insensitivity, he suggested Japan should acquire nuclear weapons and South Korea should pay more for its defence. He promised to tear up the multilateral Trans-Pacific Partnership, a promise he then fulfilled. And he vowed to eliminate the threat posed by North Korea by any means, including military action.

Wholesale reform is needed by our leaders in parliament and society as a wholeIt has taken less than a month for the assault and harassment scandal that has engulfed Hollywood to spread to Westminster. In the past few days, our political system has become paralysed by allegations of assault and harassment by male MPs. Instead of a sober, swift and professional response, we have witnessed the spectacle of political parties desperately scrabbling to produce an adequate reaction and ministers clumsily fighting for their political lives.

There is a real risk the gravity of the crisis that has consumed Westminster is judged superficially by the number of political scalps it claims. In the wake of a sexual harassment scandal that has highlighted the abuses of power that can take place in the shadowy corridors of Westminster, this cannot be allowed to happen.

The principle of common good underpins the constitution. Donald Trump is gleefully shredding that idealThe Trump administration, having passed the six-month milestone in office, kicked off the next phase of his presidency with an explosion of crazy, spread over the past seven days. Like sweeps week on The Apprentice, every day saw some headline-grabbing event to garner ratings. It started with leaks against his former bosom buddy, attorney general, Jeff Sessions. President Trump, sources said, was planning to fire him. It moved on to a speech to the Boy Scouts of America jamboree, where Trump told the story of a property developer who lost a fortune and was lurking at a New York party with the hottest people. Later, there was a tweet announcement banning transgender people from the military.

This explosion of crazy concluded with his new White House chief of communications, Anthony Scaramucci, calling the New Yorkers political correspondent Ryan Lizza to trash virtually everyone in the White House. He compared himself positively to the presidents dark lord and special adviser, Stephen Bannon: Im not Steve Bannon, Im not trying to suck my own cock. Im not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the president.

When it was revealed last Friday night that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was about to begin making arrests in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal: one key detail stood out: Jared Kushner was secretly out of the country. No one knows what he was in Saudi Arabia for, and Trump’s White House still refuses to explain it, but in any case Kushner returned home and he was not among those arrested. However, Saudi Arabia has suddenly plunged into a state of chaos with major arrests and a potential regime change underway, raising questions about just what Kushner was doing over there and what Donald Trump was tweeting about this morning.

This evening the royal family of Saudi Arabia arrested one of its own most powerful members, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a multibillionaire international investor, according to a CNBC report (link). Others have also been arrested and/or ousted from the government. This is being officially referred to as a corruption crackdown, but in authoritarian regimes, that’s often code for an attempted regime change. Then there’s Jared Kushner.

We do know that Kushner has long been tasked with the vague goal of establishing Middle East peace for the Donald Trump administration, though he has no skills to make that happen, and there has never been any evidence that he has any real strategy or plan. His recent trip to Saudi Arabia, and the White House’s insistence on keeping the details of the trip a secret, strongly suggest that it was not an above-board trip. Then this morning Donald Trump tweeted this: “Would very much appreciate Saudi Arabia doing their IPO of Aramco with the New York Stock Exchange. Important to the United States!” Then the New York Times (link) revealed a new deal between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

So now we have Jared Kushner taking a secret trip to Saudi Arabia with a secret mission, then Donald Trump suddenly and publicly courts Saudi Arabian business, then a few hours later Saudi Arabia and Russia strike a deal, and a few hours after that, members of the Saudi Arabian royal family no appear to be trying to oust each other in a power struggle that could lead to regime change. What the heck is going on?

Inside story: How Russians hacked the Democrats’ emailsfox4kc.com
An Associated Press investigation into the digital break-ins that disrupted the U.S. presidential contest has sketched out an anatomy of the hack that led to months of damaging disclosures about the Democratic Party’s nominee. It wasn’t just … Three…

Paul Ryan Puts It All on the Line in Tax FightNew York Times
Mr. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, spoke with Carl Hulse about his plan to push the potentially legacy-defining tax plan through Congress, his evolving relationship with President Trump and the lessons he learned waiting tables at a restaurant across …

Communism’s bloody centuryThe Australian
Communism’s tools of destruction have included mass deportations, forced labour camps and police-state terror a model established by Lenin and especially by his successor Joseph Stalin. It has been widely imitated. Though …. Vladimir Putin’s…

Trump, Japan’s Abe meet amid heightened tensions with North KoreaABC News
President Donald Trump has said his relationship with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is one that “has never been closer,” and Abe has described Trump as “a leader who I can have great confidence in.” Trump hopes this relationship will pay off in …

TOKYO President Trump offered a brief overview of his five-country, 12-day trip to Asia as he flew from Honolulu to Tokyo on Saturday, telling reporters that he expects to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin while abroad, plans to pressure other leaders to take a tougher stance on North Korea, and thinks he is […]

Hackers hijacked multiple Trump addressesThe Australian
After the hack, computer users who visited the Trump-related addresses were unwittingly redirected to servers in St Petersburg, Russia, that cybersecurity experts said contained malicious software commonly used to steal passwords or hold files for …

Donald Trump just departed on a twelve day overseas trip to Asia. His staff is able to regularly supervise him during these trips, limiting his ability to sneak off and post a mentally incompetent Twitter meltdown. But he did manage to fire off a cryptic tweet on Saturday morning which seemed oddly specific: “Would very much appreciate Saudi Arabia doing their IPO of Aramco with the New York Stock Exchange. Important to the United States!” In the hours since, the government of Saudi Arabia has plunged itself into total chaos and this can’t be a coincidence.

Just hours later, CNBC reported that the royal family of Saudi Arabia arrested one of its own wealthiest and most influential members, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, who has invested his money heavily in American companies (link). Others were also ousted from governmental power, as the Crown Prince looks to seize full control over the nation, in what amounts to a partial regime change. Trump’s tweet was some kind of signal to the Crown Prince and Jared Kushner’s secret visit to Saudi Arabia now sticks out like a sore thumb.

Kushner took the trip without the public knowing, and when the media subsequently asked about it, Trump’s White House declined to provide a satisfactory answer. Harvard Law Professor Laurene Tribe characterized Prince Alwaleed’s arrest in this manner: “This is the prince who stiffed Jared on his recent secret mission to Saudi, where of course Putin & Trump are in cahoots.” The company Trump referenced in his tweet, Aramco, is the official government-owned oil company of Saudi Arabia.

So the timeline now looks like this: Jared Kushner secretly traveled to Saudi Arabia and asked Prince Alwaleed to bail out his sinking personal fortunes. Alwaleed refused. One week later Donald Trump publicly invited the Saudi Arabian government to launch its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Hours later, the Saudi Arabian government arrested the Prince who had just refused to bail out Kushner. And because everything about Trump relates to Russia, Saudi Arabia just announced a major new oil deal with Russia.

Late-night hosts discussed the president’s feud with George Conway and reviewed the long list of 2020 candidatesLate-night hosts took aim at the president’s Twitter feud with Kellyanne Conway’s husband and summarised the state of the 2020 race.Tweet Fighter: Kellyanne’s Husband vs. Kellyanne’s Boss pic.twitter.com/dYyDxfQy4Z Related: Trevor Noah on Boeing: ‘How was a self-crashing plane allowed […]